Rood | Page 9

next to it, spiked metal sensor
arrays protruded from each into the tank it accompanied. Tonx had
glued recycled LCDs to the front of each tank and wired them to the
canisters. As he watched, the displays cycled through a string of
numbers and acronyms that meant absolutely nothing to Fed.
Tonx settled onto a stool in front of the shelves and thumbed on a strip
light over one of the tanks. As Fed watched a fat goldfish swam into
view over the blue pebbles covering the bottom of the tank. Tonx
snickered.
"Watch this" he said.
He pulled out two film canisters from next to the tank, one white, one

black, and emptied the contents of both into his hand. Then he dropped
them into the water. The fish swam faster, darting around, poking at the
canisters. It nudged and pushed at them until the air clinging to their
sides tore away and they settled onto the bottom.
"You put food in those?" asked Fed.
"Nope" said Tonx, smiling. Inside the tank the fish seemed to have lost
interest and was swimming around aimlessly. "Here. Drop one of these
in."
Tonx handed him two small black rocks and a penny. Fed shrugged and
dropped the penny into the tank.
Without hesitating the fish swam to the penny and grabbed it, wedging
it into its mouth before swimming over to one film canister and then
the other. The goldfish nudged the canister upright and deposited the
penny inside.
Then the fish swam over to the side of the tank and looked out at him.
"Put in a rock" whispered Tonx, clearly enjoying himself. Fed did. The
fish caught the rock before it hit the bottom and put it in the other
canister, then returned to watching them from inside the glass. Tonx
keyed in a sequence on the canister next to the tank and a thin slick of
grayish fluid seeped out of one of the spines. Inside the tank the fish
began to bob up against the surface of the water, sucking at the slick.
"What the fuck was that?" whispered Fed. Tonx just laughed and
turned off the light over the tank.
"That, my little man" he said, "is a mutagenetically altered goldfish.
Your brother here found a way to conjoin endomorphic neurological
tissue with shocked brain tissue using genetically modified
carcinogens." He smiled proudly.
Fed slowly raised his eyebrows. Tonx rolled his eyes and sighed. He
was clearly enjoying himself.

"I cut and pasted some brains, and used a GM cancer to make it stick"
he explained.
Fed let his eyebrows stay raised, waited for the long explanation that
was sure to follow. Tonx strolled over to the futon and fell back on its
rumpled sheets.
"The coursework I worked on at MIT focused on mutagenics. The big
breakthrough I came into there was the use of endomorphic tissues -
you remember that?"
"Yeah" said Fed, squinting as he remembered the hazy past, back when
Tonx had been clean-cut, carefully clad, ready for his break into the
corporate graduate schools. Ready to make it, big time. "Yeah,
endomorphic tissue is from squids and stuff, yeah?"
"And a lot of other critters, yes. It's tissue that can readily change. Stuff
like color, shape, firmness... that kind of stuff. Turns out that
endomorphic tissue readily accepts mutagenesis."
"That is..." asked Fed.
"Meaning it's easy to hack its genetic code. Endomorphic tissue readily
accepts changes to its base DNA sequences. It led to a bunch of patents
Johnson & Johnson licensed off MIT for those T-cell multiplier
Band-Aids. The ones they recalled because they gave a bunch of people
a nasty rash?"
Fed remembered. "Yeah. Funny shit. Why was that?"
"Not everyone's body gets rid of mutagenic cells the same way - a lot
of folks' skin freaked out and tried to isolate the cells thinking it was
foreign tissue. Made lots of little bitty scars under the skin. Anyway,
J&J got bit because they didn't test it well enough. They only used
refugees from Serbia as a test base. They happened to have readily
mutagenic-prone cell bases."
"So they didn't get the rash?"

"Exactly. But J&J imported the stuff here and slapped it on a bunch of
people and all of a sudden the entire population of Irish Americans in
New York started getting nasty zits. Biogenetics are like that, man. Got
to take into account the entire variance of the human genome, you
know?"
"So what about the goldfish?"
"Right. Lots of people had discovered that using endomorphic tissue as
a base provided you with a ready chunk of material you could
mutagenetically alter directly. But as a conversion vector it's got a lot
of problems - mainly, the body thinks it's a virus.
"Just about the time I bailed from